The Role Of Femininity In The Victorian Era

Throughout the paper I will be examining women’s femininity during the Victorian Era from the 1830s to the 1900s. From the start of the Victorian era the perfect woman as an ideal of femininity was relentless. Women were expected to be prim and proper, as well as pure and hygienic. Women were slaves to fashion, yearning for men’s approval; they had to suffer from heavy crinoline cages on their hips to restricted corsets clinging to their rib cage. I will further my research of how femininity was truly represented in the Victorian Era and the realties of beauty for women living England during the era. I will continue to focus on how women were portrayed by the powerful men surrounding them. Women were inferior to men; however, they were expected …show more content…
“The gender history of England in the Victorian era can be read in two ways, as an overarching patriarchal model which reserved power and privilege for men; or as a process of determined but gradual female challenge to their exclusion.” Gender roles were prevalent in the Victorian era, men were superior to women and during the era roles became more defined. Men would go to work and for the families who could afford it left women at home “to oversee the domestic duties that were carried out by servants.” Men and women lived in “separate spheres” men possessed authority and independence in their sphere, and women had their own sphere of femininity, emotion, and submission. The idea of both sexes having separate spheres allowed men to control and women to be easily dominated. “‘Natural’ characteristics of women and men became apparent, women were physically weaker yet morally superior to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere.” At a young age women were beneath their fathers and once they were married their husband was another man with higher dominance, men influenced all aspects of a woman’s life. Women were expected to be elegant and feminine, if a woman was well educated it was considered “unfeminine and off-putting.” A woman’s education typically included singing, piano, dance, and feminine etiquette “as well as the art of conversation and the art of silence.” Women would learn from their mother’s to understand a female’s social life and once they became mothers they would do the same for their future children. Young Victorian women were to focus on finding a husband and achieve motherhood; it was assumed that all women desired to become mothers “rather than pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction.” The assumption men made for women in the Victorian era was that the majority of women did not have any